Indiana University Bloomington (IUB) – Association of University Professors (AAUP)

Sponsored AAUP Lecture: Academic Freedom in the Age of Trump
Speaker: Hans-Joerg Tiede
February 23, 2017 | 4pm
Swain East 140

The 2016 election has exacerbated a political climate that was already inimical to academic freedom. We have recently seen legislative and gubernatorial attacks on individual faculty members, course offerings, governing boards, the institution of tenure, and, generally, the institutional autonomy of colleges and universities. Websites such as Professor Watchlist are monitoring activities of faculty members and denouncing departures from what they view as acceptable. These activities have led to targeted harassment of faculty members. This presentation provides an overview of the concept of academic freedom, recent attacks on academic freedom, and how you can defend academic freedom.

Hans-Joerg Tiede is a senior program officer with the national AAUP in the department of academic freedom, tenure, and governance. He previously served as a professor of computer science at Illinois
Wesleyan University.

Tiede’s contributions as a national AAUP leader include serving on the Council, the Committee on
Membership, the Committee on College and University Governance, Committee A on Academic
Freedom and Tenure, and the Committee on the History of the Association, which he also chaired.
As a member of the Committee on College and University Governance, he was the primary author
of two statements: Confidentiality and Representation in Academic Governance (2013) and Faculty Communication with Governing Boards: Best Practices (2014). While a member of Committee A, Tiede served on investigating committees at the University of Northern Iowa (2012) and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2015).

For the last several years, he has regularly taught workshops on shared governance, faculty
handbooks, and academic freedom and tenure at the AAUP/AAUP-CBC Summer Institute,
and at the two most recent AAUP annual conferences, he gave plenary presentations on
AAUP history.